Cybersecurity: How Do You Build Trust Within Your Network?

Today I read an interesting white paper from Cisco, Cybersecurity: Build Trust, Visibility, and Resilience. The paper focused on security issues across the internet, and what government leaders and IT staff need to know to keep systems safe. The report focused on five areas:

• Understanding the proliferation of risks
• Achieving a trusted network
• Creating network transparency and visibility to assess risks
• Establishing network resilience when security incidents do occur
• Working with Cisco to address trust, visibility, and resilience in the network

Cybersecurity is often cited as one of the main concerns for organizations, the Cisco report states, “The uses of multi-vector attacks are growing. Cyber criminals remain intent on targeting legitimate websites, with strategically timed, multi-vector spam attacks in order to establish key loggers, back doors, and bots. Criminals plan their malware to arrive unannounced and stay resident for long periods. Regardless of your market sector, the threat is growing.”

The report pays particular focus to “trust,” which Cisco says is typical overused in cybersecurity discussions, but a fundamental practice that needs to be established within an organization. Cisco asks pointed questions about trust, such as, who can you trust within your network? Can you trust how devices are connected to your network? Can you trust that you are not exposed to unnecessary risks?

Cisco then provides three steps to provide trust within your network:

• Asset Discovery and Management: Validating user and device identity at the system point of entry and maintaining a state of trust
• Configuration Management and Remediation: Identifying misconfiguration and vulnerability so that corrective actions can occur to assure policy compliance and risk reduction
• Architectural Optimization: Design and feature application combined with best practices to create a threat-resistant and risk-tolerant infrastructure

I’d encourage you to take a look at the white paper. It is a quick read with some interesting insights on cybersecurity.

How do you maintain trust within your network?

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